
a_chinn
Joined Aug 2011
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a_chinn's rating
I started off with this film thinking it's not as bad as I was expecting based on all its abysmal reviews. However, after an entertaining first act, it quickly goes downhill with boring redundant explosions and action you quickly become numb to and uninterested in. Cribbing from everything from MAD MAX, to BLADE RUNNER, to STAR WARS, the film doesn't have an original bone in its body. I never played the video game the movie is based on, but I'm guessing it's a knockoff of all these sources as well. However, seeing Cate Blanchett in an unabashed popcorn flick is pretty fun and does goes a long way in making the film just barely watchable. I really wish I could have seen her character in a much better of film.
I'd just watched director Alain Resnais' masterpiece, HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR, and was blown away, so I had to check out one of his other films. In LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, he again explores the faultiness of memories, but with far less success. Telling a surreal story at a posh chateau where a man is convinced he and a woman met once before and had a torrid affair. Is it gaslighting? Is it repressed memories? Is it different perspectives on the same experience? I believe the filmmakers land on the latter, but it's never made explicitly clear. You're not always sure if we are in the present or a memory or even who is telling a particular story or memory at that moment. It's audaciously filmed in a highly stylized manner, where entire rooms of people are frozen in place except for one or two characters or with strange and surreal repeated images. However, the film is emotionally distant and cold compared to HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR. It feels more like an exercise in cinema than trying to tell a human story. Resnais accomplishes what he set out to do, but it's not as satisfying of a film experience.
I'd somehow never watched this beautiful and heartbreaking cinematic masterpiece. A French film actress shooting a film in Hiroshima has an affair with a married Japanese man. The film follows the two over a few days, during which they share their perspectives on the war, as well as intimate details of their past loves. With themes around the faultiness and complexities of memory, especially when it comes to past traumas as well as with love. This story of unrequited love then asks, is it worth loving someone at all, knowing it will eventually end? Directory Alain Resnais, in his directorial debut after years of working as an editor, brings unconventional filming techniques and non-linear storytelling, which predates but was highly influential on the French New Wave. The opening shots of a lovers' embrace, where it's unclear if it's perspiration or burns from the war on their skin, are sensual and disturbing at the same time. HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR is masterful filmmaking, but the human story makes the film so memorable. Two lovers who know they cannot be together and their time is short, sharing their most intimate thoughts, stories, and memories. It's likely because they both know their relationship is finite, which is why they are able to so openly share these most intimate of feelings and experiences. Throughout the film, the audience knows these two cannot be together, and it's a cloud that hangs over the entire love affair. Without spoiling anything, the film has a scene in a restaurant near the end that has to be in my top ten film moments of all time. This is a beautiful and unique film for which very few compare. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE is probably the closest film I can think of to this one, but even that film cannot match HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR. On a side note, there's a fun, cheesy, direct-to-video action film called HELL HATH NO FURY, whose plot set-up is very similar to a story shared by the woman about falling in love with a German soldier during the war. However, in the action film, the female character ends up hunting for Nazi gold. I like to think that film was secretly a prequel to this one. ;)